Tell me about your favorite scent

This was the topic chosen for an impromptu speech contest that I attended recently. I'm a Toastmaster and we regularly hold speech contests. For this year's Beginner's Cup Speech Contest, I was assigned to be one of the organizers. Last year, I was one of the contestants and I remember the anxiety of being in the spotlight and delivering my speech to the judges and the audience.

I was assigned as the timer for the contest. Every speech had an allotted time and contestants who went below or above the required speech times were disqualified. I was also responsible for informing the contestants of their remaining time. There was a timing device for that. They call it the Traffic Light. It had green, yellow, and red lights. For the Table Topics Speech category, a contestant was given 1 to 2 minutes to deliver an impromptu speech. Going below 1 minute and over 2 minutes and 30 seconds would render the contestant disqualified.

Going back to the title of this post: Tell me about your favorite scent. This was the topic that all contestants had to answer. Contestants were put inside a holding room and were asked to be on stage to give a speech about the topic one after the other.

I heard many answers and interesting reasons. Coffee, roses, peppermint, menthol, vanilla, floral scent, the Cool Water Perfume. Those were the varied answers. Being busy with tracking and signaling the time, I didn't have the chance to think about what my answer would be. But when the contest was over, I found myself contemplating my answer to the Table Topic.

My favorite scent is the smell of bread. For me, nothing smells better than freshly baked bread. This scenario is always a delightful experience for me:

I am walking down a street and pass by a bakery. Suddenly, a warm, inviting, and delicious smell embraces me.

The scent of freshly baked bread fills me with joy and a sense of peace. Maybe because it reminds me of the time when we used to have a bakery at home. We had this huge oven and my relatives would circle around a big table kneading and shaping dough before placing it inside the hot oven. I would just stand there, staring, waiting, hoping that there would be some bread intended for me. And there always was. Because there was so much bread to go around.

Or maybe it reminds me of times when what I had for breakfast was always freshly baked bread that I brought to school. I remember going to my Thermodynamics 3 Class, a very difficult class for me, but one thing that made me hopeful and excited to get inside the classroom was my bread. I couldn't wait to sit down and bring out my fragrant food.

For me, the smell of bread brought out hope and expectation that there was always something good intended just for me no matter how difficult the situation was. How about you? What's your favorite scent? I hope it reminds you of good times and how good you are despite the many challenges you are facing.

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Fast forward many years, our huge oven is now history and I don't bring bread to school very often anymore. Instead, what I have is the lure of coffee shops, bakeshops, and pastry shops. The photos you see are from a shop called Abaca Baking Company. It's a famous shop in the Philippines that sells delicious baked goods and coffee. It's part of a group of restaurants and resorts around the country.

On one particular visit, my girlfriend and I decided to have our breakfast in Abaca. We went inside their small shop in IT Park, Cebu City. It was still early so there weren't a lot of people inside. This was still during the pandemic, so only a few people were allowed to stay indoors at a time. This was still a time when people were required to wear masks and face shields. People were, in a sense, not allowed to be sick. Hospitals were full and medical supplies were scarce. Businesses shut down and people lost jobs.

The Abaca Shop where we went was fortunate enough to be able to open again. They had a lot of pastries on display. We ended up having some Danish pastries and a chocolate puff. I had coffee and my girlfriend had hot chocolate. We enjoyed our breakfast together and finished our food as if everything was okay. We had a slice of a carefree moment.

That memory fills me with a sense of joy and hope akin to what I feel when I smell freshly baked bread although there was no such smell when we had those pastries. I realized that it wasn't actually because of the scent that brought me hope. It wasn't even about the bread. It was about the thought that there is always something to enjoy and to look forward to even in the midst of a crisis.

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